Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Does Title Tag location in a page's source code matter?
-
Currently our meta description is on line 8 for our page - http://www.paintball-online.com/Paintball-Guns-And-Markers-0Y.aspx
The title tag, however sits below a bunch of code on line 237
Does the location of the title tag, meta tags, and any structured data have any influence with respect to SEO and search engines? Put another way, could we benefit from moving the title tag up to the top?
I "surfed 'n surfed" and could not find any articles about this.
I would really appreciate any help on this as our site got decimated organically last May and we are looking for any help with SEO.
NIck
-
Hi Nick,
I noticed that as well it is definitely in the header, but it is currently not been found by tools that mimic google bot.
I am running a DeepCrawl.co.uk scan of the site as we speak I will post it when it is finished.
-
Thomas,
I looked at the page source and found the the title tag; it sits at the very end of the head section; not sure if that makes a difference or not. Do you know if there are any instances where we can see the title tag in the page source but some how it is not seen by search engines?
Nick
-
Beautiful Thomas! Thank you so much for taking the time to analyze the site. I may have to look into recommendation of authoritydev.com
-
It's true that it wouldn't matter to the user, such as 'above the fold' real estate. But, to the bots do pay attention to the parts invisible to the user and should be optimized too.
-
The page that you are having trouble with is not showing up as rendering a title in more than one tool
** title tag search**
Screaming Frog
** crawl review**
** internal URLs**
** feedthebot.com**
** I went deeper**
** your server is either slow or the coding is killing it is most likely the coding.**
Google pagespeed score
68 out of 100
This webpage is on the slow side of average. See below the reasons why your page is slow.Load time
Page begins to be seen in: 1582 milliseconds
I have pasted it a lot of graphics below in order to show you that the URL
http://www.paintball-online.com/Paintball-Guns-And-Markers-0Y.aspx
is not showing a title tag to search engines nor is it something four tools have been able to find the title tag regarding that link.
More disturbing is amount of URLs without title tags in the more in-depth crawls.
My strongest suggestion is that you contact a developer.
I can recommend the authoritydev.com
they are very good.
Sincerely,
Thomas
EX4Lb9W.png BwzRStn.png 3g0HEF5.png eDVEJhJ.png voNKl6Q.png YuCMcOc.png panniPZ.png
-
I mean I'm not saying that it's not possible, but above the fold is relevant to the user because it's actually something they see. The section is completely invisible to a user, hence shouldn't be relevant.
-
I honestly don't think that the <title>tag location is your issue.</p> <p>One issue that I'm seeing is that your page load time is pretty abysmal. According to tools.pingdom.com your page load time is around 8 seconds. This probably has to do with the massive amount of code that your site is using. That is at least one thing you may look into improving.</p></title>
-
Yeah, maybe not. But, 'above the fold' is understood to be better real estate on a web page - why not higher up on a document too?
-
I'm not sure that I agree with this. If this were about the
or any element that is actually visibile on the page then I'd be inclined to agree but there is really no reason that you should need to put the <title>tag higher up as long as it is within the <head> section. It really shouldn't affect anything in my opinion.</p></title>
-
Does the location of the title tag, meta tags, and any structured data have any influence with respect to SEO and search engines? Put another way, could we benefit from moving the title tag up to the top?
Yes, location does matter.
Let's consider this extreme scenario: A competitor and you are competing for the same term and have the following...
- The term being targeted is exactly the same
- Both you and your competitors' domain have the same authority
- You both have the same inbound links and internal link structure
- Both properties' content is optimized
Basically, you and your competitor have the same internal/external optimizations - so all other factors are equal aside from the <title>location.</p> <p>Pages are rendered from top to bottom. Crawlers read pages from top to bottom. Your competitors' <title> tag is higher on the page than yours. When Google crawls the site, they understand this (the location of the title tag in relation to the page). How will they decide between your page and your competitors' page? Your competitor puts the title tag up higher on the page than you do, it must be more important.</p> <p>Now, this is a very extreme scenario that is super difficult to replicate (you'd need to control both sites to do it properly). But, using this extreme can show why location of the <title> tag is important. It may be a very slight difference, but sometimes that is all that is needed.</p></title>
-
As long as it is in the section of your page. Crawlers look for tagging information in this section first so it may be missed if it is anywhere else.
If you are concerned about the amount of code in the top head section, you could move all that javascript into a external js file and reference it.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google has deindexed a page it thinks is set to 'noindex', but is in fact still set to 'index'
A page on our WordPress powered website has had an error message thrown up in GSC to say it is included in the sitemap but set to 'noindex'. The page has also been removed from Google's search results. Page is https://www.onlinemortgageadvisor.co.uk/bad-credit-mortgages/how-to-get-a-mortgage-with-bad-credit/ Looking at the page code, plus using Screaming Frog and Ahrefs crawlers, the page is very clearly still set to 'index'. The SEO plugin we use has not been changed to 'noindex' the page. I have asked for it to be reindexed via GSC but I'm concerned why Google thinks this page was asked to be noindexed. Can anyone help with this one? Has anyone seen this before, been hit with this recently, got any advice...?
Technical SEO | | d.bird0 -
Do you need a canonical tag for search and filter pages?
Hi Moz Community, We've been implementing new canonical tags for our category pages but I have a question about pages that are found via search and our filtering options. Would we still need a canonical tag for pages that show up in search + a filter option if it only lists one page of items? Example below. www.uncommongoods.com/search.html/find/?q=dog&exclusive=1 Thanks!
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Why is Google Webmaster Tools showing 404 Page Not Found Errors for web pages that don't have anything to do with my site?
I am currently working on a small site with approx 50 web pages. In the crawl error section in WMT Google has highlighted over 10,000 page not found errors for pages that have nothing to do with my site. Anyone come across this before?
Technical SEO | | Pete40 -
Two META Robots tags on a page - which will win?
Hi, Does anybody know which meta-robots tag will "win" if there is more than one on a page? The situation:
Technical SEO | | jmueller
our CMS is not very flexible and so we have segments of META-Tags on the page that originate from templates.
Now any author can add any meta-tag from within his article-editor.
The logic delivering the pages does not care if there might be more than one meta-robots tag present (one from template, one from within the article). Now we could end up with something like this: Which one will be regarded by google & co?
First?
Last?
None? Thanks a lot,
Jan0 -
Duplicate title-tags with pagination and canonical
Some time back we implemented the Google recommendation for pagination (the rel="next/prev"). GWMT now reports 17K pages with duplicate title-tags (we have about 1,1m products on our site and about 50m pages indexed in Google) As an example we have properties listed in various states and the category title would be "Properties for Sale in [state-name]". A paginated search page or browsing a category (see also http://searchengineland.com/implementing-pagination-attributes-correctly-for-google-114970) would then include the following: The title for each page is the same - so to avoid the duplicate title-tags issue, I would think one would have the following options: Ignore what Google says Change the canonical to http://www.site.com/property/state.html (which would then only show the first XX results) Append a page number to the title "Properties for Sale in [state-name] | Page XX" Have all paginated pages use noindex,follow - this would then result in no category page being indexed Would you have the canonical point to the individual paginated page or the base page?
Technical SEO | | MagicDude4Eva2 -
Duplicate page titles on Ecommerce
Hi, My question is in reference to an E-commerce site- Our SEO MOZ scan is showing many errors for Duplicates- such as Duplicate titles - The majority of these are on the products map- and the page titles are Products Map :: Company Name How do we get correct this or does Google not penalize for it? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | frankrizzo0 -
Do I need to add canonical link tags to pages that I promote & track w/ UTM tags?
New to SEOmoz, loving it so far. I promote content on my site a lot and am diligent about using UTM tags to track conversions & attribute data properly. I was reading earlier about the use of link rel=canonical in the case of duplicate page content and can't find a conclusive answer whether or not I need to add the canonical tag to these pages. Do I need the canonical tag in this case? If so, can the canonical tag live in the HEAD section of the original / base page itself as well as any other URLs that call that content (that have UTM tags, etc)? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | askotzko1 -
Should we use Google's crawl delay setting?
We’ve been noticing a huge uptick in Google’s spidering lately, and along with it a notable worsening of render times. Yesterday, for example, Google spidered our site at a rate of 30:1 (google spider vs. organic traffic.) So in other words, for every organic page request, Google hits the site 30 times. Our render times have lengthened to an avg. of 2 seconds (and up to 2.5 seconds). Before this renewed interest Google has taken in us we were seeing closer to one second average render times, and often half of that. A year ago, the ratio of Spider to Organic was between 6:1 and 10:1. Is requesting a crawl-delay from Googlebot a viable option? Our goal would be only to reduce Googlebot traffic, and hopefully improve render times and organic traffic. Thanks, Trisha
Technical SEO | | lzhao0